The Face of Another

The Face of Another (1966)

他人の顔

It’s always lonely being free.

A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his new doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality and causing him to question his identity.

Date of release
1966-07-15
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (301)
Runtime
2h 2m
Genres
Drama, Science Fiction
Director
Hiroshi Teshigahara

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Face of Another

The Face of Another is a 1966 Japanese New Wave film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and based on the 1964 novel of the same name written by Kōbō Abe. The story follows engineer Okuyama, who suffers severe facial burns in a work-related accident and is given a new face in the form of a lifelike mask.

Production

One recurring image is the large and small severed ears which appear in the scenery in several scenes. These ears were designed and sculpted by Japanese sculptor Tomio Miki.

Hira's office, a strange blank space with glass partitions, was designed by architect Arata Isozaki, a friend of Teshigahara's. The glass walls are painted with Langer's lines and Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

The film uses several doublings of shots, both by repeating shots verbatim and by placing the main character in nearly identical shots twice. The most obvious example is in Okuyama's two separate rentals of apartments, once masked, and once with his new face. These doublings highlight Okuyama's double existence.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended